From the time they were first perceived as wanderers among the stars, the planets, the sun, and the moon, hereinafter sometimes referred to collectively as "the planets," have been the subject of speculation and inspiration. The very naming of the planets after the Gods--Jupiter, Mars, Neptune--provides a link with those by-gone days when mortals on earth looked in awe at the planets and saw in them everything that exemplifies the unknown and the unknowable. Even today, while people experiencing a solar eclipse do not fear that the world is ending, they cannot help but at least understand and perhaps feel some of the apprehension felt by their forefathers.
In spite of the aura of mystery that surrounded celestial movements and phenomena, the ancient civilizations did produce people who were able to develop the calendar, navigation, and time measurement based on objective observation. While superstition and fear tended to cast a pall on objective inquiry during the Middle Ages, a spark of objectivity and curiosity regarding the movement of the heavens continued to burn, and painstaking effort over periods of many years provided the empirical data from which Kepler was able to derive his famous laws and on which Newton was able to base his theory of gravitation. In more recent years, painstakingly precise astronomical measurements of planetary positions and distances have uncovered subtle phenomena such as the precession of the perihelion of Mercury which have been used to test Einstein's theory of general relativity.
Over the years, the students of celestial movement have applied the data of this motion in three major areas. Astronomers seek to relate astronomical phenomena to calendar language and to positions in space in order to explain phenomena such as phases of the moon and eclipses based thereon. Astrologers attempt to correlate planetary positions with behavioral events for the purposes of predictive study. Navigators use position information to orient their position on earth based on certain position coordinates of stars and planets. Over time, these disciplines have understandably become increasingly separated from each other as the purpose to which position data was applied became more specific to the needs of the particular discipline.
In addition, various timing notations have been developed to describe the location of a planetary or celestial body in the field of view of the observer. These notations are derived from timing based upon either the ecliptic or equatorial plane. The varying disciplines of astronomy, astrology, and navigation have tended to employ individualistic languages, making it difficult to develop tools providing common access to information.
Even within a given methodology the data presentation has often been awkward and difficult to use. For example, astrologers make use of numeric ephemeris information expressed in terms of Greenwich time. Such information is often awkward to use since an individual's location with respect to the International Data Line creates day changes which must be taken into account in any position determination. Additionally, such ephemeris information does not readily lend itself to making apparent the positions of the planets relative to one another. Yet, astrologers are interested in the timing and position of various angular relationships, called "aspects," and astronomers are interested in angular relationships, most specifically between the sun and the moon for the purpose of predicting eclipses and phases of the moon.
U.S. Pat. No. 1,880,476 to Ploner discloses apparatus for casting horoscopes, one element of which is a chart which has depicted, through traditional graphing methods, the numerical ephemeris by plotting the planetary positions as a function of time. The planetary positions are in terms of longitude along the ecliptic with a uniform ecliptic division corresponding to the twelve zodical signs, each having an angular extent of 30.degree.. The chart does not provide any reference frame for astronomers, and does not allow the extraction of information of interest to astronomers, such as the times of upper meridian transit of different planets. Moreover, planetary aspects may only be obtained by means of a separate transparent overlay chart. Thus, while it is known to provide planetary positional data in a form of graphical representation to avoid the need for reliance on numerical tabulations, such graphical representation has tended to be limited and highly specialized, even for astrological use, and has provided little or no benefit to astronomers and navigators. Furthermore, it has not presented a whole system of movement of which information derived from an ephemeris is just a part.